In a wireless communication system, a data stream will most likely experience multiple reflections (multipath) while propagating between the transmitter and the receiver. Multipath fading implies that multiple copies of the transmitted signal follow different paths and reach the receiving antenna with different time delays. In such cases the received signal strength at a given time is the result of destructive and constructive interference of the multiple paths arriving from different directions. Destructive interference degrades the performance of the detector and hence adversely affects the system capacity. However, by using multiple antennas at the receiver and with appropriate digital signal processing methods, multipath can be exploited to enhance the performance and robustness of the receiver and to increase the reliability of the communications link. The receiving antennas generally must be spaced sufficiently far apart that the signal each antenna sees is not correlated with the signals seen by the other antennas. One such method of mitigating multipath fading is called selection diversity.
Selection diversity is based on selecting the best signal among plurality of signals detected at the receiver antennas. Let Pi denote the power estimated at antenna i at the receiver. Then, the selection diversity scheme will select antenna j as the receive antenna if Pj>Pi, i≠j. Higher accuracy in estimating the powers Pi results in higher probability of the right receive antenna being selected and better performance of the selection diversity scheme. Two main factors that affect the accuracy of the power estimates Pi may include a dwell time on all antennas other than the starting antenna and presence of impairments such as noise, transients and offsets.
With regard to dwell time on all antennas other than the starting antenna, in practical wireless communications systems, time constraints are imposed to keep the transmission overhead low. As a result, the dwell time on all antennas other than the starting antenna is insufficient to allow for automatic gain control (AGC) to run its full course during the dwell time on each antenna. Without automatic gain control, the visibility of the signal strength of all antennas other than the starting antenna is limited and generally leads to inaccurate power estimates Pi.
With regard to the presence of impairments such as noise, transients and offsets, impairments corrupt the power estimates Pi and may result in mis-estimations of the received power. Such mis-estimations of power may result in the selection of antenna j as the receive antenna even if Pj<Pi for some other antenna i. Because dwell time on all antennas other than the starting antenna is limited, a predetermined gain may be generally applied to all antennas other than the starting antenna. When the signal in antenna j, where antenna j is not the starting antenna, is very strong, the predetermined gain applied to antenna j may be too high for that signal and the signal may be clipped. If the clipped signal in antenna j was in fact the best received signal available to the receiver, the receiver may end up selecting a signal from antenna i, where Pi<Pj, because it may not be able to estimate accurately the power of a signal when it is clipped.
In general, the power estimate of the starting antenna is generally more reliable than those of the other antennas because carrier detection and full AGC are performed on the starting antenna. This leaves insufficient time for running a full AGC on the other antennas. Although there are ways to improve the accuracy of the power estimates of antennas other than the starting antenna, the selection diversity scheme will perform considerably better and more effectively if the starting antenna happens to be the antenna with the highest signal power.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.